Short answer: yes, artificial light helps plants grow. But the longer answer is why one fixture saves you money and another burns through your budget. I’m the procurement manager at a 40-person horticultural company. I’ve managed our lighting budget (about $180,000 annually) for six years, compared more than a dozen fixtures, and made enough mistakes to know what to check before signing an order.
This isn’t a formal Gavita plasma grow light review, but I ran a plasma unit next to HPS for 18 months, and I used the same process when we bought our first batch of Gavita Pro 900e LED fixtures. If you’re searching “does artificial light help plants grow” because you’ve seen a leather chandelier in the same feed, let’s clear that up first: a leather chandelier is decor. A “chandelier jellyfish” light fixture is also decor. They are not grow lights. Decorative lighting won’t hurt your plants, but it won’t feed them either. A real grow light has to deliver the right intensity, spectrum, and duration.
Here’s the checklist I use. It’s five steps, and they’re meant to be done in order.
When to use this checklist
Use it when you’re choosing lighting for a greenhouse or an indoor grow room, replacing old fixtures, or trying to decide between LED and another technology. It also works if someone asks you “does artificial light help plants grow” and you need a practical process, not just a yes/no answer.
Don’t use it if you’re choosing a statement light for a lobby or living room. That’s a different problem.
The 5-step checklist
Step 1: Define your target DLI before looking at fixtures
PPFD gets all the attention, but the number that matters for the crop is the daily light integral, or DLI—the total amount of usable light a plant gets in a day, measured in mol/m²/day. Leafy greens tend to be happy around 12-18 mol/m²/day. Fruiting crops like tomatoes and cucumbers often need 25-40, especially with supplemental CO2. Those aren’t exact prescriptions, but they give you a starting target.
Most people skip this and jump straight to lumens or watts. That’s backwards. If the fixture doesn’t match your crop’s DLI requirement, no spectrum or brand name can fix it.
Step 2: Calculate the true cost of ownership (TCO)
Unit price is not the cost. I’ve been burned by that more than once. In 2023, I compared a plasma fixture that cost less upfront—somewhere around $1,100, maybe $1,150, I’d have to check the invoice—and an LED fixture that cost more. The plasma looked like the better deal for about 30 minutes. Then I added the power draw, the cooling load from the heat it dumped into the greenhouse, and the replacement part that failed at month 9. The LED was the cheaper option over five years. I didn’t trust the math at first because the LED felt expensive. The TCO spreadsheet doesn’t care about feelings.
Include shipping, mounting hardware, controller adapters, and electricity. If you don’t, you’re comparing prices, not costs.
Step 3: Ask for third-party test reports
In the LED world, you want an LM-79 photometric report and LM-80 lumen maintenance data. Those standards are not random marketing pages; they tell you how the fixture performs and how long the LEDs are expected to last. If a vendor can’t share them, that’s a red flag.
Also ask for a PPFD map at the mounting height you plan to use. A map from a sales brochure is usually measured in an ideal testing space. Your greenhouse has support beams, walkways, and uneven sunlight. The map is a starting point, not a promise.
Step 4: Check voltage, controls, and mounting before you order
This is the step that most people ignore because it’s boring. It’s also the step that separates a clean install from a nightmare. A fixture like the Gavita Pro 900e LED is available in different voltage options—120-277V and 208-480V—so you have to know what your facility actually has. Check the line voltage, the plug type, and whether the fixture plays well with your environmental controller. We use TrolMaster, and I verify compatibility before ordering. An adapter can be fine, but it’s another part that can fail.
Step 5: Run a side-by-side trial for one full cycle
Don’t trust a PAR map. Don’t trust my opinion. Run one row with the new fixture and one row with the current fixture for at least one crop cycle. Measure PPFD at canopy level with a quantum sensor, not a phone app. Note how the crop responds, how much heat is generated, and how easy the controls are to use.
I knew I should run a full trial before committing to plasma. But the spectrum looked so good that I thought “what are the odds the spread is that bad?” The odds caught up with me: we measured a 40% drop near the edges of the bench. We ran the trial for another cycle and decided to go with the Pro 900e LEDs instead.
Even after ordering that first batch, I kept second-guessing. What if the drivers failed in our summer heat? The six weeks before delivery were stressful. Then we measured PPFD in 25 spots and it came close to the report. That’s when I started to relax.
What about plasma and LED?
Plasma had a real moment, and it did some things well. The spectrum was honestly gorgeous, and the light quality was genuinely different from HPS. But in 2025, the efficiency and long-term cost of LED fixtures have moved ahead. That’s not an attack on plasma. It’s the industry evolving. What was best practice in 2020 may not apply in 2025. The fundamentals haven’t changed—intensity, spectrum, duration—but the execution has transformed.
The same logic applies to HPS. In cold climates and winter months, the radiant heat from an HPS fixture is sometimes useful, so I’m not going to tell you it’s obsolete everywhere. The right answer depends on your location, crop, and power rate.
Watch-out: decorative lighting is not grow lighting
I keep seeing this question appear with search terms for home decor: does artificial light help plants grow if I use a leather chandelier? Or what about a chandelier jellyfish design with RGB bulbs? The answer is maybe a little, in the same way a candle gives heat. For a serious plant, especially if you expect yields, use a fixture that’s actually designed for horticulture. If you’re growing a low-light houseplant near a bright decorative lamp, it might survive. That’s a long way from thriving.
Final notes and common mistakes
Three mistakes I see over and over:
- Focusing on watts instead of efficiency. Wattage is an input, not an output. Two 600W fixtures can have very different photon outputs.
- Ignoring heat. Every watt that turns into heat is either wasted money or it’s heat you need for your greenhouse. Calculate that, even if it seems boring.
- Ordering everything before testing one unit. If you’re buying dozens of fixtures, one test fixture is cheap insurance.
Yes, artificial light helps plants grow. The question is whether it helps your specific plants at a cost you can defend. This checklist won’t make the decision exciting. It will make it cheaper.